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I scrambled out of his grasp and stood. Pacing back and forth. “Don’t say that to me.” It had to be a lie.
He stood and took my hand gently, but firmly. Holding on like he might drown if I let go.
As for me, I felt as if I would lose myself in him if I didn’t pull away. I would want his lie to be the truth. I yanked my hand away and leaned against my dresser for support, my eyes begging him not to come closer.
He seemed to teeter about what to do but kept his distance. “Scarlett,” he whispered. “You were so young and inexperienced. I should have known better.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means, you deserved to have a choice.”
“And you benevolently gave me one. Do you want me to thank you?”
“No. I want you to understand. Leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I did it because I love you.”
My mouth fell open, dumbfounded. “That makes zero sense.” And please, for all that is good and holy, stop saying you love me.
He took a step closer. “Scarlett, it makes perfect sense. The way our relationship was headed, where did you think it was going?”
I bit my lip and looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know.”
“You do know. You’ve been in enough relationships now to understand right where we were headed.”
I lowered my head and glared at him. “And that was too awful for you to bear?”
He didn’t hesitate this time and pulled me to him. We were body-to-body and face-to-face, sharing the same breaths. His eyes bored into mine. “Scarlett, for eight years I’ve longed to have you in my arms. I’ve dreamed of coming home to you every night and making a life with you. Making love to you.”
My body burned with a heat so fervent, I melted where I stood and was rendered immovable and speechless. For so long, I had dreamed of those same things. Still, that was all they would ever be—dreams. Tears streamed down my cheeks, yet I couldn’t say anything.
He gently wiped some of the tears away with his thumb. “That’s where we were headed. And you deserved the choice of whether that was your final destination or not.”
His words loosened my tongue and my ire. “You didn’t give me the option. You walked away with no regard to my feelings. For eight years, I questioned if what we had was real.” I raised my voice, which I never did. “I wondered what I had done to make you leave. Why you had told me to follow my dreams and then snatched the one I wanted most away from me,” I cried, always too honest with him.
He rested his forehead against mine. His tears dripped onto my nose. “What we had was so real it hurt.” His lips came dangerously close to mine, and, for a brief second, I almost let him close the distance. Almost.
I pushed away from him and began to pace again, running my hands through my long hair, which had gotten curlier as the day had gone on. No straightener was a match for the Georgia humidity. “We’re not doing this, Kane. You made your choice.”
“I was trying to do the right thing,” he replied earnestly, begging me to believe him.
“The right thing would have been to tell me the truth back then. Did you think I couldn’t handle it?”
“No, damn it. I knew if I told you the truth, you would have convinced me to stay.”
I stopped pacing and whipped my head his way. “You’re wrong. I would have told you to go and then booked a ticket to see you over the holidays. I would have called you every day just to say I loved you and I missed you. I would have even looked into going to medical school there. The one thing I wouldn’t have done is give up on us.”
He sighed deeply. “I never gave up. I gave you time to live your life. And whether you agree with me or not, you deserved that. Do you think I wanted you to wake up fifteen years down the road and regret that you never knew life outside of me?”
“I wouldn’t have regretted it.”
“You can say that now because you’ve received your education, traveled, and have known life with other men. And as much as I’ve hated to watch other men touch you and love you, I always hoped they were only stepping-stones back to me. Or . . .,” he swallowed, “that you would find someone who made you ridiculously happy.”
So maybe he made some valid points, but still. “Right. I should thank you for being so noble and self-sacrificing, all for my benefit. And I could see how hard it was for you, pining away for me all these years, with your supermodel girlfriends who you loved to shove in my face every Christmas. Thank you for all the awkward dinners, by the way.”
